# Prefer-DAS: Learning from Local Preferences and Sparse Prompts for Domain Adaptive Segmentation of Electron Microscopy

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.19423 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19423/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Diffusion and multimodal model alignment, one of 10 directions in LLM alignment / RLHF / preference optimisation.
- Builds on 25 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Feb 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM alignment / RLHF / preference optimisation / [Diffusion and multimodal model alignment](https://mlsanity.com/alignment/diffusion-and-multimodal-model-alignment/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18290/) (2023)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Deep reinforcement learning from human preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03741/) (2017)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [CyCADA: Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03213/) (2017)
- [Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.00868/) (2018)
- [Diffusion Model Alignment Using Direct Preference Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12908/) (2023)
- [Learning to Adapt Structured Output Space for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.10349/) (2018)
- [Medical SAM Adapter: Adapting Segment Anything Model for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12620/) (2023)
- [DN-DETR: Accelerate DETR Training by Introducing Query DeNoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01305/) (2022)
- [Segment Anything Model for Medical Image Analysis: an Experimental Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10517/) (2023)
- [SAM-Med2D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16184/) (2023)
- [Aligning Diffusion Models by Optimizing Human Utility](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04465/) (2024)
- [On Softmax Direct Preference Optimization for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09215/) (2024)
- [Causal Confusion and Reward Misidentification in Preference-Based Reward Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06601/) (2022)
- [Improving the Generalization of Segmentation Foundation Model under Distribution Shift via Weakly Supervised Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03502/) (2023)
- [POPEN: Preference-Based Optimization and Ensemble for LVLM-Based Reasoning Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00640/) (2025)
- [Enhancing SAM with Efficient Prompting and Preference Optimization for Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04639/) (2025)
- [WDA-Net: Weakly-Supervised Domain Adaptive Segmentation of Electron Microscopy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13109/) (2022)
- [Weakly-Supervised Cross-Domain Segmentation of Electron Microscopy with Sparse Point Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00667/) (2024)
- [Fast Mitochondria Detection for Connectomics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.06024/) (2018)
- [Prompt-DAS: Annotation-Efficient Prompt Learning for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation of Electron Microscopy Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18973/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Domain adaptive segmentation (DAS) is a promising paradigm for delineating intracellular structures from various large-scale electron microscopy (EM) without incurring extensive annotated data in each domain. However, the prevalent unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) strategies often demonstrate limited and biased performance, which hinders their practical applications. In this study, we explore sparse points and local human preferences as weak labels in the target domain, thereby presenting a more realistic yet annotation-efficient setting. Specifically, we develop Prefer-DAS, which pioneers sparse promptable learning and local preference alignment. The Prefer-DAS is a promptable multitask model that integrates self-training and prompt-guided contrastive learning. Unlike SAM-like methods, the Prefer-DAS allows for the use of full, partial, and even no point prompts during both training and inference stages and thus enables interactive segmentation. Instead of using image-level human preference alignment for segmentation, we introduce Local direct Preference Optimization (LPO), plug-and-play solutions for alignment with spatially varying human feedback. To address potential missing feedback, we also introduce Unsupervised Preference Optimization (UPO), which leverages self-learned preferences. As a result, the Prefer-DAS model can effectively perform both weakly-supervised and unsupervised DAS, depending on the availability of points and human preferences. Comprehensive experiments on four challenging DAS tasks demonstrate that our model outperforms SAM-like methods as well as unsupervised and weakly-supervised DAS methods in both automatic and interactive segmentation modes, highlighting strong generalizability and flexibility. Additionally, the performance of our model is very close to or even exceeds that of supervised models.